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Under pressure your answers reach first for flight: you are gone before the storm breaks, the difficult conversation gets postponed, the loud room gets left, and the problem gets solved by not being where it is. This is one of the four things a nervous system does when it reads threat, and it is neither cowardice nor weakness. It is a strategy that once worked, and still does, right up until the thing you left is a person.

What it gives you is self-preservation and perspective. You do not escalate, you do not say the unforgivable thing in the heat, and you are often the one who, having left, can see the situation more clearly than anyone still standing in it.

The friction is that leaving reads as abandonment to the people left behind, and that some things — a partner's anger, a manager's feedback, a decision that cannot wait — do not resolve by being outrun. They wait, and they compound. The practices that help are about staying a little longer: ninety seconds past the point you would normally go; saying "I need to step out and I will come back at four" instead of simply stepping out; and telling one person that the exit is a nervous system move, not a verdict on them.